New digital images and silkscreens by Jeremy Welsh.
Welsh is a British/Norwegian artist based in Bergen, former professor at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design and the Academy of Fine Art in Trondheim NTNU. He moved from London to Trondheim in 1990 to lead the Intermedia program at the Academy of Fine Art in Trondheim, Norway’s first integrated art education in video, data, and new media. After 11 years at KiT, he moved to Bergen in 2001 and became a professor, later head of the master’s program at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design.
While Welsh is best known for video art, which he has been involved with since the early 80s, he has also worked simultaneously with collage, photography, and digital graphics. In recent years, he has exhibited images on several occasions, including the Vårsøg Exhibition, Surnadal Cultural Center in 2019, and with the solo exhibition “6 Songs, ABOT, IOD” at Kunstgarasjen, Bergen in 2024. The series “6 Songs” from 2024 was produced at Trykkeriet and forms the basis for this year’s exhibition. All the images in this year’s exhibition are based on collages, found image fragments, and the artist’s own photo archive. Each has been digitally processed and either transferred to large-format digital prints or converted to analog images in silkscreen.
The print technicians at Trykkeriet produced the prints in close collaboration with the artist. Welsh has previously used the silkscreen process multiple times in larger public art projects, including at Halden Prison (2009) and the Østland Terminal at Posten in Lørenskog (2010). With experience as a graphic designer in the late 70s and early 80s, he has long had an interest in a visual language that combines elements of fine art and design.
A Map…. is the title of a diverse collection of visual material produced over the last year. As quite an absurd proposition, the title is a hint on how one might read the images, but is not a recipe pointing to any specific meaning. The images in the exhibition, a selection from a much larger series, are meant to point toward one another and provide an opportunity to read the exhibition as a whole. Many of the images hover between concrete representation and a more abstract expression. Shifts in scale and the building of motifs in several layers combine to open a dialogical space where both the artwork and the viewer play a role in meaning-making. The images are meant to be both serious and playful, and the intention is that the joy of creation is visible in the exhibition.
The exhibition opens on March 15th and runs until April 13th.
For more information about Jeremy Welsh’s projects: https://jewelsh.blogspot.com/